U.S. Debate on Gun Laws Is Put to a Test in Colorado

DENVER — With politicians in Washington deeply divided over new gun regulations, an urgent national debate ignited by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School is storming into state legislatures across the country. And nowhere is that debate more emotionally charged or politically consequential than here in Colorado, a reluctant crucible for the battle over guns.

This state, one of hunters and sport shooters, has endured two of the most horrific mass shootings in American history, and this year for the first time in more than a decade it could pass major gun-control legislation.

Gun-control advocates say it is a moment forged in part by the massacre inside a suburban Denver movie theater in July that left 12 people dead and dozens wounded. But it is also one created by demographics, of population shifts that have nudged the political center left while transforming traditionally rural, conservative swaths of the West.

“We’ve had it with mass shootings,” said Beth McCann, a Democratic state representative. “People just don’t want to hear about another massacre. This is enough.”

To lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the debate, Colorado is becoming a national test case for what kind of gun regulations — if any — can gather support from lawmakers, law enforcement officials and a public whose relationship with guns has been forged by tradition as much as tragedy.

This is a place where even the horrors of the 1999 attack at Columbine High School in suburban Denver only temporarily shifted the debate on guns. In 2000, Colorado voters passed new restrictions on purchases made at gun shows, but a few years later, the General Assembly relaxed gun laws by making it easier for people to carry concealed weapons and limited the ability of towns and cities to pass strict gun laws.

Gun ownership here crosses generations and political divisions. Liberal Denver lawyers own handguns, and the Democratic governor takes his son to hunting safety classes. A popular family shooting range sits in the center of Cherry Creek State Park, drawing some sport shooters who voted for President Obama, others who insist he is a communist.

As legislators across the country reconvene, heavily Democratic states like New York, New Jersey and California are considering proposals to restrict assault weapons and ammunition that are far more aggressive than anything likely to pass in Colorado, even with Democrats in control of the Statehouse.

Gov. John W. Hickenlooper, a first-term Democrat, has called for universal background checks of private, individual gun sales, in addition to the checks now required at gun shows and at retail establishments. But in an interview, he said he was unsure about proposals from Democratic lawmakers to ban high-capacity ammunition magazines.

“Even saying that puts some people into a frenzy,” Mr. Hickenlooper said. “People in the West have a very strong, deeply anchored belief in people’s right to bear arms.”

That division came into sharp relief when Mr. Hickenlooper called for universal background checks in his State of the State address on Thursday. Democrats in one half of the chamber leapt to their feet and applauded while members of the Republican minority sat in stony silence.

Democratic lawmakers have not formally introduced their gun-control measures, but have said they are writing bills that would create background checks for private, person-to-person sales and restrict high-capacity magazines like those used by the gunman in the movie theater, in Aurora.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national gun-control organization, has hired a Denver lobbying firm to support new gun-control laws here.

State Senator Greg Brophy, a Republican, said the attention from outside groups would make Colorado “ground zero for gun control in the United States.”

Republican supporters of gun rights have bristled at the push for tighter gun laws. One of the first bills introduced in the legislature would allow teachers with concealed-weapons permits to carry guns inside their classrooms (with a school district’s permission). Mr. Brophy was one who recoiled at the universal background checks, saying the only way to enforce such a system would be to require all gun owners to register their firearms.

“That is the most onerous regulation ever conceived of in this country outside the outright confiscation of firearms,” he said. “Even if I want to loan a shotgun to my nephew to take out pheasant hunting, I can’t do that. I don’t think they realize here in Colorado just how dangerous that proposal is to liberty.”

The prospect of stricter gun laws has sent gun sales soaring, and unleashed a torrent of new applications for background checks and concealed-carry permits. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which runs the checks, has a backlog of nearly 11,000 applications, and wait times have reached unprecedented levels.

Across the country, the battle over guns is pulling states in sharply different directions. While Democratic-controlled states are pushing for greater restrictions on ammunition, assault weapons and tougher background checks, lawmakers in Mississippi are considering changes to the state’s concealed weapons bill that are backed by the National Rifle Association.

And Wyoming’s Republican-dominated Legislature is considering a bill to block any new federal restrictions on semiautomatic guns or ammunition magazines.

“These weapons they’re trying to eliminate are something we hold dear in the Western United States,” said State Representative Mark Baker of Sweetwater County, in southern Wyoming. “We’re trying to let the federal government know ahead of time we’re not going to allow you to enforce your laws and regulations on our state land.”

Colorado still embraces its history of rugged individualism and the range, but it has never been as conservative as some of its neighbors.

“I do think it is important for people to understand that even though we are a Western state and there is a libertarian strain here, I think sometimes people think the gun lobby is maybe more powerful here than it really is,” said Bill Ritter Jr., a Democratic former governor and a hunter who pointed out that he had been elected despite an F rating from the N.R.A.

And as the gun debate moves ahead, some of the most influential voices may not belong to lobbyists or lawmakers but to relatives who lost their sons and daughters, husbands and wives in the library of Columbine and in Theater 9 in Aurora. For months, several of these families have been huddling with lawmakers and making public appearances to call for tighter background checks and measures to keep guns away from people with mental illnesses.

“It’s different now because children are being butchered in schools,” said Dave Hoover, a police officer in Lakewood, Colo., whose nephew A. J. Boik was one of the 12 people killed in Aurora. “Because kids were killed at a movie. Because families went to church and were gunned down.”

He added: “I don’t understand why we are even arguing about this.”

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